Last Word of the Week: Laura E Goodin

Posted on by Clare

And so it begins! The first instalment of the Last Word of the Week project is here.

In LWOTW, writers share their thoughts about the craft and business of writing, with tips for aspiring writers and inspiration for all booklovers.

Today I am thrilled to welcome the dynamic, witty, redoubtable Laura E Goodin as my inaugural interviewee.

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LWOTW: When did you write your first story?

Laura: I may have been…seven? It was about…my stuffed animals? Something like that.

LWOTW: What do you think of dreams, imagination, and planning?

That’s just about all I ever do think about: dreams, imagination, and planning. For me, the words are very nearly synonymous, and all three are as indispensible as breathing. My dreams and my imaginings are generally the first stages of planning for either my next real-life adventure or my next piece of writing. Or both.

LWOTW: What’s the highlight of your writing career so far?

While I’ve been lucky to have had lots of amazing writing adventures in a startlingly short time, from my first sale (a story accepted in Antipodean SF, although no money changed hands) to my first paid sale (a story in the Canterbury 2100 anthology from the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild), from my six tempestuous weeks at Clarion South to entering the hall to receive my PhD in creative writing. But I think the highlight among many highlights has been the four-city launch tour I did when my first novel came out in 2016. Friends and family members from Melbourne, Canberra, Wollongong, and Sydney came to celebrate what they all knew was the dream of a lifetime for me, finally come true. I was particularly overwhelmed by the turnout in Wollongong: we’d recently moved away to Melbourne, and I’d sort of wondered if I might have gone out of sight and out of mind. But the room was PACKED with people I loved and missed, and their goodwill and pride filled my heart to bursting.

Goodin Wollongong launch Photo by Heather ONeill_larger

LWOTW: What are you most busy with at the moment?

I wish I could say it’s writing the next novel. But really, it’s keeping my editing business going and promoting my two existing novels. However, I’m taking steps to shift the balance back toward writing. I’ll never be less busy, but I’m getting to the point where, after a tough couple of years, I’ve got a bit of leeway to allocate my time in ways that favor the writing a little more. That said, I also maintain a complex program of extracurricular activities, some of which augment the editing business (I’m a professional fencing instructor and I teach writing whenever I get the chance) and some of which are necessary because they feed my soul a rich diet of magic and melodrama (that would be the bellringing), and some of which I do because I just plain like doing them (cooking and going to the gym would be examples).

LWOTW: If you could say one thing to aspiring writers, it would  be…?

I would sit them all down and I would stare at them until they began to shift uncomfortably. Then I would say in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “You will never be satisfied with what you write. You will always be convinced that everything you write is shit. You must write it anyway. You must. The shittiness is irrelevant.”

And the Last Word of The Week: What’s your favourite colour?

A rich, mossy, velvety green. The green of the soft, shaded carpet at the water’s edge. The green of contemplation and calm. The green I remember from the woods and mountains of my childhood.

LWOTW would like to thank Laura for her thoughtful answers, and also for being brave enough to go first! Love your work, Laura!

Links to Laura:

Laura’s web site: http://www.lauraegoodin.com

Laura blogs at: https://lauraegoodin.blogspot.com

You can find her on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Laura.E.Goodin.Writer/

And Laura tweets @lauragoodin

Novels: Laura suggests that it’s best to search Amazon for After the Bloodwood Staff and Mud and Glass. Better yet, ask your local indie bookstore or library to get them in!

Image credit: The great photo of Laura signing her book was taken by Heather O’Neill.

 

On discovering that one is a writer…

Posted on by Clare

Repost: An excellent read from Irish writer Evie Gaughan

I read somewhere that you don’t become a writer; you discover you are one, and I suppose that’s what happened to me. People always talk about their love of books as a child, but I also had a love of stories and storytelling. So much so, that I often made up my own and told […]

via My Writing Life — Evie Gaughan

Cover me, I’m going in…

Posted on by Clare

Into bookshops, of course.

Scandinavian bookstores to be exact, some of which are worth the investment of several hours. Although all these shops have sections where English books are stacked and shelved in their dozens, I found myself drawn to the local language books. Here I confirmed that, for better or worse for us authors, potential readers DO judge a book by its cover.

The conventions of genre in imagery help us to distinguish crime from fantasy from romance from historical fiction from military memoirs from poetry, and so on. Classics with new, interesting covers (like those in the header image) live on the strength of their titles and authors. Newer fiction must usually play by the rules, although that doesn’t necessarily mean playing in the same well-worn rut.

For example, I like this new fantasy cover for the prolific (and wonderful) Brandon Sanderson‘s The Final Empire (first published 2006). This cover clearly references the genre but presents a more up to date, fresh, arty take on it. You could think that its first imprint was at least ten years later.

IMG_3288In a watercoloured, simplified way, all the genre markers appear. Fantasy city: check. Mysterious being: check. Spooky question to set up the fantasy premise: check. Weird misty atmosphere: check. Potential to adapt for the later books in the series: check. And is there a suspicion of snow on those towers … Jon Snow? GOT readers say: ‘my kind of book’, as do Harry Potter and LOTR folk. Probably, as do fantasy readers in general.

And here’s a novel clearly set in or around the time of the First World War. Clearly. It also features the poppy on the spine, so you know the genre even when it’s facing the wall.

follettIt’s Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants in Norwegian. Even if we hadn’t noticed the guns and the sepia-tinted photo, that poppy gives it away. Are those soldier-photos and poppies clichéd? I guess yes, but they also act as immediate identifiers for readers who are eager to read something similar to books they have already enjoyed.

Now what about family sagas and romance? Evidently (from my observations), a reader wants to see a woman on the cover, most often with her back to us, contemplating her situation. Her attitude and costume communicate the historical period covered in the novel:

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Many crime stories also feature women, usually with their backs turned to us, walking into danger. Women? Of course, I should say ‘girls’ for that genre 🙂

My own WWI novel will be published later this year, and I am agonising over what might make a good cover – to poppy, or not to poppy? – being the main question. Do I need a rising sun to mark it as Australian? And a woman in historical costume to signify that it is a family-based romance as well as a war story? My brains are on the rack.

If you have any brilliant ideas for what I could suggest to my publisher, please leave me a comment below!

PS All photos taken by me.

 

Coming soon: the Last Word of the Week

Posted on by Clare

Good news, readers and writers!

From the first Friday in July, we are starting a new project called the Last Word of the Week (LWOTW). Every Friday, a different writer will join me for a Q&A about the craft and business of writing.

I’m very much looking forward to getting started with all these clever, generous folk.

 

Image Credit: The Garden of Chenenceau, by Clare Rhoden

 

Writing exercise: back stories

Posted on by Clare

Here’s an exercise that can help you get from an idea to a piece of flash fiction, from flash fiction to short story, and from a short story to a novel (or trilogy!).

I am often asked how I got from the short story “Man/Machine/Dog” to the novel The Pale, and this is one of my favourite techniques.

It also works to reduce writer’s block and start your imagination. All you need to start is one word. Give yourself a minimum 10 minutes to try this exercise, and let me know what you finished up with.

Step One:

Come up with a name. Just one name. [Betty or Blip or Foxy or Xianny, Miko or Tehuano or Dot. It doesn’t matter.] Write it down.

Step Two:

Give me FIVE adjectives to describe Blip. Just five, and as quick as you can. Don’t over work this part. [Blip is old, crabby, tired, inventive and smart.]

Step Three:

Answer these four questions:

  1. WHEN is Blip?
  2. WHERE is Blip?
  3. WHAT is Blip doing?
  4. WHY is Blip doing it?

[Blip lives in the twelfth century. She’s in a monastery. She’s trying to steal a scroll. She wants to learn to read.]

Step Four:

Who are Blip’s parents? Give me two more names. [Betty and Nomo.]

Step Five:

You have created a character and you know quite a lot about that character. Now write FIVE sentences to create a small story about your character.

Step Six:

Have a look at your five sentences. Now decide what, if anything, you as a writer can do with the results of your exercise.

For example, do your five sentences already form a piece of flash fiction? Do you want to write more about this character and her situation? Can you fill in more details about her parents, using the same technique? Can you create another character, using the same technique, and join their stories? Do you want to ditch the character, but work on the situation? Can you use what you’ve written as a back story to ground another idea?

Writing, for me, is a bit like creating an iceberg, that thing that you only see the top bit of. There’s a lot more backstory than ever appears in the final piece of work that is presented to the reader. Even if you never use the work you have done today, at least you have exercised your imagination and your writing skills. The best way to write more is to, um, write more!

Today’s great photo is by Ian Myles, from Flickr at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/imphotography/6953920766/

Five questions, a writing exercise, and a picture

Posted on by Clare
Today’s wonderful image is from WallUp Wallpaper Images

Today I had the pleasure of speaking to some creative writing students at Victoria University, in the western suburns of my hometown Melbourne.

Being trapped in the spotlight in a room full of other writers felt a bit daunting, so instead of just reading from my book and then expecting discussion, I structured my given hour around reading, writing, questioning and visualising fiction.

In this post, I’ll look at the questions I prepared and the answers we discussed. These are the five questions I am most often asked since The Pale was published:

  1. Where do you get your ideas?
  2. What made you want to write about this?
  3. How did you go from a short story to an 80,000 word novel?
  4. How did you find a publisher?
  5. How do you sell books?

My ideas come from the real world and from dreams. (I find my dream stories have had better success in finding publication – but that topic is for another post!) In the case of The Pale, in 2014 I had a dream that I was locked inside a wire compound and that there was a crying baby on the ground outside the gate. Nobody would let me go out to pick up the baby, and eventually it was left to my old German Shepherd dog, 15-y-o Dinny, who arrived suddenly at the baby’s side and rescued it.

The morning after the dream, I wrote the first draft of Man/Machine/Dog, which was published in Overland 215, Winter 2014.

What made me want to write about this dream was the refugee crisis, in particular Australia’s response, which I continue to find deeply distressing. (More information at the Refugee Council of Australia.)

From short story to novel took me almost a year and I did this mostly by writing backstory for all the characters. I created a writing exercise around this for the students which I will outline in a later post.

Finding a publisher was a pitted path. After the story was published, a start-up sci-fi publisher asked about the novel (which I had not written!). The first draft, which I sent to them, was seriously under-done and rightly rejected. Many revisions later, after learning more about the industry by attending workshops at Writers Victoria, I searched for a publisher willing to accept unsolicited submissions electronically (who wants to pay postage on a novel-sized project?). I sent a much re-worked version to Odyssey Books and was thrilled to be accepted for publication. I have some tips for organising and surviving your submissions – but that too is for a later post.

Selling books is quite hard. There is so much excellent competition out there, and marketing is not a core skill for me. It took me quite some time to grow a writerly skin which allowed me to submit my writing (poor shivering creature!) to publishers, and I am aiming now to grow a marketing persona. There are a number of associated activities that authors can undertake to help sell their books, and I will outline some of these in a later post. I can’t do everything, but I can always do something to help my book get into the hands of readers.

Speaking of which (shameless plug alert), if you’re in the market for a gripping read in dystopian sci-fi, you can buy The Pale here, or at the usual places, like Booktopia or Amazon.